What to think about such a stupid statement from s&p like this:

“Venezuelan bond prices rose and the Standard & Poor’s debt-rating agency upgraded its outlook on Venezuela’s creditworthiness, saying the country will now be better able to balance its budget and pay down its $58 billion in foreign and domestic debt”

I generally agree with libertarian philosophy as I cannot reconcile the ideas of social democracy with basic philosophical thought on good government, particularly the basic principals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. The desire to shape the outcome of a society via government forced rules and regulations violates the rights of sovereign individuals.

e.g. government consists of a collection of people, and thus has no more rights and privileges than the people have in the first place. Most modern day governments violate the natural sovereignty of individuals via nothing more than mob rule at the point of a gun, i.e. majority rule enforced by majority threat of force. This is not a principal of good government that can be argued via philosophy - it is rule by brute force.

I very much like Switzerland although I’ve spent time only Geneva and Bern. Who needs TV !? I think the Zurich might be better than these too. What do you think? Where are you based?

To me, Switzerland and Singapore are the two lands that are the closest to that for two very different reasons: switzerland because of their political system, and moderate tax rates. singapore because it’s a military regime, but extremely open to free enterprise and capitalism, and extremely low tax brakets.

If you have others that might be freer, please let me know. I am kind of looking to relocate…

I remember reading from Linda Gottfredson in a paper she wrote in 1997 (”Why g Matters”) that people who have an IQ of about 115 (one standard deviation above the mean) are able to read The New York Times. I wonder how many people understand the “Austrian Business Cycle Theory” article on Wikipedia because it has a high grade level and low readability (using the addedbytes readability test) because it has complex sentences and lots of multisyllabic works.

One reason that I am not a libertarian is that it lacks on manifestation of a positive vision: what does a world of “liberty” would look like? Surely, it would not be a utopian paradise, but I do not such a vision solving any of the real maladies of the world (no I am not thinking about global warming here). If we regard economic liberty as sarcosanct, I suppose the ideal outcome would be Hong Kong as it has the highest “Economic Freedom” rating (conducted by the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation). In other posts, you made the argument that libertarianism and limited government lead to technological advancement by correlating the advances of the Industrial Revolution with limited government environment. Even if we do accept a casual relationship, another question we have to ask is how long will it take for great progress to come to fruition? Remember, people usually discount the future for the present, and in order to convince people you have to make the predictions of progress fall into the Maes-Garreau Point i.e within our lifetimes. (Wiki “Maes-Garreau Law”: it is a law that optimistic futurists make optimistic predictions that would happen within their lifetimes. For example, Ray Kurzweil predicts the Singularity will happen in 2045; he probably would not live this long with existing medical technology, but he thinks that intermediate medical advances will allow him to live long enough to see it.) I might concede that social democratic countries are less innovative than the US; but they are good bicyclists behind the slipstream of the innovator taking their innovations and using them to stay at a close second.

But my main point is that I do not see how a libertarian nation would be superior to a social democratic ethically homogenous country with moderate intelligence (if we believe the work of Richard Lynn). I do not see how a “libertarian” government is sustainable even if we do fervently agree to the ends of libertarism; it is inevitable that it would be hijacked by special interests for personal gain by using their market power (even if acquired justly in a Nozickian way) to convert their economic power into political power.

Well, libertarians do have a valid point about the damage that corrupt and/or incompetent politicians can inflict. In The Open Society and Its Enemies Popper (who was sympathetic towards social democracy when he wrote it) said:

It is my conviction that by expressing the problem of politics in the form ‘Who should rule?’ or ‘Whose will should be supreme?’, etc., Plato created a lasting confusion in political philosophy. It is indeed analogous to the confusion he created in the field of moral philosophy by his identification … of collectivism and altruism. It is clear that once the question ‘Who should rule?’ is asked, it is hard to avoid some such reply as ‘the best’ or ‘the wisest’ or ‘the born ruler’ or ‘he who masters the art of ruling’ (or, perhaps, ‘The General Will’ or ‘The Master Race’ or ‘The Industrial Workers’ or ‘The People’). But such a reply, convincing as it may sound—for who would advocate the rule of ‘the worst’ or ‘the greatest fool’ or ‘the born slave’?—is, as I shall try to show, quite useless.

First of all, such a reply is liable to persuade us that some fundamental problem of political theory has been solved. But if we approach political theory from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any fundamental problems, we have merely skipped over them, by assuming that the question ‘Who should rule?’ is fundamental. For even those who share this assumption of Plato’s admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently ‘good’ or ‘wise’ (we need not worry about the precise meaning of these terms), and that it is not at all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely. If that is granted, then we must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: Who should rule? by the new question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage? Emphasis Popper